Although video teleconferencing offers an attractive alternative to face-to-face meetings, its adoption has not been as pervasive as predicted. Certainly with the cost and inconvenience of air travel, being able to conduct conferences through electronic video conferencing provides a low cost and convenient alternative. However, the ergonomics inherent in video conferencing to date have limited its application.
It is well known that in addition to what is said at a meeting, emotional signals which are non-verbally communicated between parties can be very important. In the human body, muscle is the tissue that is specialized for the production of movement. Every muscle in the body connects to other structures via tendons, except in the human face. There, muscles connect directly to the skin. The musculature of the human face has evolved for a particular purpose, that is, to produce a variety of movements in the surface of the face, movements that are elements of a signaling system between human beings. The visible movements in the skin produced by facial muscles are called facial expressions. All human beings share an identical facial anatomy; they all have the same facial movements arranged in the same manner. Further, as demonstrated by various research practitioners, all human beings generate the same invariant group of facial expressions. In addition, all human beings are born with systems necessary to interpret those facial expressions.
Facial expressions therefore constitute an innate communication system, the evolutionary roots of which far predate spoken or written language. All written language is at most ten thousand years old, and spoken language a few hundred thousand years old. By contrast, the signaling system of which facial expressions are a part is approximately one hundred million years old. It is noted that specific areas of the human brain are dedicated to the processing of human facial expressions. Neural systems in the brain that decode facial expressions are significantly older than those responsible for conscious and voluntary behaviors. The decoding of facial expressions is part of an inherited neural architecture in the brain—it is invariant and involuntary.
The eyes are of particular importance in emotional signaling. Not only do the eyes contribute to the display of emotions such as fear or surprise, but human beings also use eye contact and the direction of gaze to communicate signals about the emotional context of an interaction. Eye contact and gaze direction impart information about the participants' perceptions of their relative social rank, personal power, trustworthiness, mutual liking, and assertiveness. Eye contact signals are also crucial in coordinating the exchange of speaking and listening roles, which occurs rapidly and fluently within normal conversational speech. Not surprisingly, research has demonstrated that human beings are highly proficient at making precise determinations about gaze direction in others. This function, as well as the decoding of complex signals inherent in eye contact, occurs on an involuntary basis.
Unfortunately, video teleconferencing involves an inherent lack of eye contact as part of the overall conferencing experience. Eye contact is not promoted by current terminal configurations because, generally, the video camera necessary to feed the video portion of the conference is placed either at the top or sides of the video monitor so as not to obstruct the image of the remotely located conferee. Typically, the camera is placed somewhere above the display monitor such as depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,900,907. If the conferee looks directly at the monitor in conversing with the remotely located conferee, the conferee is captured at an angle above the conferee's viewing level or head. Thus, when an image of that participant is displayed at the remote station, it appears as if the participant is looking down toward the ground. This can perhaps be best appreciated in viewing FIG. 1 whereby conferee 10 is shown looking directly into viewing area 21 as part of monitor 20. However, camera 22, perched above monitor 20 captures the face of conferee 10 at a parallax angle making it seem as if conferee 10 is looking down by that same angle to the counterpart of conferee 10 at the remote location. Without suitable eye contact, the potential of video conferencing is greatly reduced.
There has been a plethora of suggestions to correct the above-noted deficiency. For example, previously mentioned U.S. Pat. No. 5,900,907 suggests placing a camera atop the video monitor with a bracket and housing that enables the camera to extend below the top edge of the monitor and onto the upper region of the image field. However, such a configuration does not enable the camera lens to extend far enough within the image to reduce the parallax angle a sufficient amount to cure the problem. In addition, the camera housing clearly obstructs the image field and detracts from the video conferencing experience.
Others, such as is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,777,665, have used beam splitters, prisms and optical refraction devices enabling the camera to be placed outside the field of vision. However, these approaches require bulky equipment and are distracting in presenting a certain amount of visual obstruction. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,400,069 suggests the use of a half-silvered mirror as a projection screen with a camera placed behind the apparent location of the face of the remotely located conferee. Such devices are necessarily large and cumbersome. Moreover, because the conferee cannot see the camera filming the event, the conferee never actually looks at the camera, but merely in the general direction of the eyes of the remote conferee.
Another approach was suggested by U.S. Pat. No. 5,500,671. In this instance, it was suggested that computer software be employed to manipulate video images on the fly so that instead of an actual face, the viewer looks at a “virtual” face in which various facial features have been altered and reconstructed to simulate eye contact. This approach is obviously hardware and software intensive and is thus expensive to construct and employ and thus somewhat impractical.
As a fall back position in light of the seeming shortcomings of the prior art, the most common practice in the video conferencing industry today is to simply place the conferee at a remote distance from the camera and associated monitor in order to reduce the parallax angle. Although by doing so, the parallax angle is, in fact, reduced, this “solution” sacrifices the participants' ability to discern the details of each other's faces and encourages them to raise their voices to tiring levels in an unconscious reaction to the distance. Ideally, each conferee should be between 2 and 8 feet from the video monitor such that the size of the face of the remote conferee is “life-size.”
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for conducting video conferencing which avoids the problems associated with such prior art devices.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide a method and associated apparatus for conducting video conferencing which promotes eye contact between conferees without the need for engaging in complicated and expensive peripheral equipment in order to achieve this goal.
These and further objects will be more readily apparent when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.